Q&A: Reclaiming Negative Emotions to Heal and Release, Sol Galeano Talks 'SANTI' EP
POURING THEIR SOUL INTO EVERY WORD THEY SPEAK — Sol Galeano’s production work is otherworldly. Their latest EP, SANTI, is a whirlwind of sound, melting together the genres of rap, electronic, and indie. Hearing it the first time through, the project looped seamlessly — and I just let it play over again. This record is a window into the world of Sol Galeano, their perspective on love, loss, and capitalism. Speaking the truth isn’t always sweet, but it is always beautiful.
Sol Galeano is a boundless, multidimensional creative. Involved in every piece of the creative vision, they dream up visuals and execute most of the production alongside other creatives. Their first project was released in 2013, followed by projects Fading in 2019 and Glassboi in 2020. With each project, there is a consistency to Sol’s creativity relating to their healing. These words shared with us through their music is just as much for Sol as it is for us. We are so fortunate to reflect alongside them as they evolve with each project. Keep reading to learn more about the story of their latest work.
LUNA: Hello Sol, How are you today? Congratulations on releasing your new EP, SANTI!
GALEANO: Thank you Clariza! I’m feeling good — happy and a bit tired, but overall feeling thankful.
LUNA: I know you are heavily involved in every process of your creative vision, from the production to the writing, and you even create your own graphics. What was your process when working on your EP, including your visual concepts?
GALEANO: I’ll try my best to answer this question without rambling too much, but, in short, my process was very chaotic but rewarding, and involved me being fully immersed and focused on my vision for it. I spent about a week recording and another week finalizing everything. I haven’t really been able to stop making things for this EP. Even today, in between doing this interview, I’m working on a website and a last minute idea to tie everything together visually, and I haven’t slept.
To give some more detail on the actual recording process, I first made “Not The Same” on May 2, left the record alone for a bit and picked it back up on June 1 because I wanted to record and have something released on the fifteenth. On June 2, I made “Madellin’s Machete,” and I wanted my friend and producer Quest to possibly add drums to it if he wanted. In passing, I mentioned we might mess around and make an EP. He was down, and it kinda just happened. On June 7, we had a studio session where we went through the drums in “NTS” and finalized it. We worked on “Madellin’s Machete” and I had brought over a new song, “2 Planets Away.” We worked on the drums and arrangement for a bit and right before I left, he made the beat for “San Cris.” So basically we spent that day just going over the instrumentation and making sure things were done to give my engineer José enough time to take breaks between mixing the songs. We were exchanging different versions of the songs almost every day up until a few days before the release date, which originally was supposed to be the fifteenth.
As for the visual concepts, I’ll start with the cover. I was already holding on to that mask and creating a rollout for another EP coming this winter. I had taken a reference photo and everything and was using that photo to build the music. Somehow though, I thought the concept would fit SANTI best — the mask had green accents and the feeling of it matched “NTS” perfectly. I knew I wanted the video for “NTS” to have heavy green all through it because I have a line in the song that mentions wearing green, so I kept having that color in mind, and I think maybe subconsciously I gravitated towards the mask because of that, too. I hit up my friend Kiana, and we got the press shots and album cover done on June 8. The next day, I decided to shoot a release day promo video. I wanted it to be composed of short clips that visually represented the songs that they were made for, like a very unofficial music video.
As far as the rollout stuff,m I’ve been posting on IG, I’ve only been working on that real time since June 12. I kind of just let ideas come and go ‘til one makes sense.
LUNA: You released your first project, Oye Mi Canto, in 2013. How have you evolved as an artist and person throughout each project?
GALEANO: I think [with] every project I was somewhat of a different person, going through different things. Each project required something different and more powerful from me. I had a big gap between my first project, Oye Mi Canto, in 2013 and the one in 2018, Turn Dove, Turn Cobra. At that point, I think I was just about ready to push myself again and get rid of any self-imposed hurdles. So Turn Dove, Turn Cobra was a celebration, coming out of a hibernation period for me and actually diving into making projects again.
In 2019, I found myself making another project called FADING, and that found me in a very different state than the year before. That found me after the end of a five-year-long relationship. What started off as me having a writing session ended up being a week of what felt like releasing a lot of things I had pent up. Eventually, it just became what it was. I noticed that these songs were about a love fading, so I titled the first half of the songs that, and it goes through a real-time process of finding a new love and having some fears around it. There’s the theme of fading all through, whether it’s through the track titles or the actual lyrics.
In 2020, I released a project called Glass Boi. The concept began when I wrote a song called “Glass Boi” after waking up with blisters on my back from taping my chest too long the night before. Not a day goes by where my dysphoria doesn’t affect me, so writing that song felt liberating. The rest of the songs aren’t necessarily speaking on my dysphoria but a lot of my sadness stems from not being able to feel truly free because of it. That sadness used to plague my relationships, my friendships, how often I would go out, and even affected how often I would accept gigs. I had been looking to house three songs I had on SoundCloud, so those made their way onto Glass Boi early on as well. The very last piece to that album was a poem my partner wrote from her perspective of having to witness my struggle real time. I want to say that around this time, I was like, “That’s it, I’m calling this Glass Boi.” Shortly after — and not intentionally — I pretty much came out publicly on IG about my dysphoria. I started fundraising for my top surgery through raffles, through proceeds from the album, through donations and kindness of strangers. I think that project found me in a stage of my life where I was ready to reclaim my power and step into a feeling that feels free. Now it’s 2021, almost a good 10 months from that release, and I just had my consultation earlier this week. I’ve been really happy because there’s been a lot of good things happening in my personal life and it all just feels like divine timing.
SANTI found me at a point where I’m confident in my skill, in what I have to say, and in my power, but I think despite being so confident, there are things I cannot control still, and it’s humbling. If anything, what this tape has done for me is to affirm me to myself; affirm my capabilities in being able to execute an idea. Being able to take leadership, but also being able to let go of control and trust others in my process. Funny enough, this is probably the only tape I’ve been 1000% sure of. The only anxiety I feel is from being too loud about it, you know? Promoting too much and taking away from the way I want it to be received, you know? I just want people to understand the work and receive it the way I intend it to be. And that’s something I’m working on as well, because art is meant to be perceived.
All in all, I never felt so at home with my music, and SANTI just feels like I have arrived; I feel confident, I feel thankful. I feel good. I’m looking forward to the next project because I have a feeling it’s just gonna be all these things I feel times 10.
LUNA: New Orleans is known for its dense music history. How did being born and raised there influence your love for music? What music did you grow up listening to?
GALEANO: It was very much “Honduras in the house and America outside” for the majority of my childhood. I don’t remember much from my childhood, but I don’t think we were a musically inclined family. But I do remember music being for certain moments as a kid. For cleaning, for whenever my parent’s friends came over, for the somber rare moments my dad would play his old Latin records and my mom playing all the classics. My pops always played disco when he was in a good mood.
So in true traditional first gen form, my parents controlled a lot of everything. I was really sheltered growing up, so I didn’t get to do many things like go to second lines, or even immerse myself in any kind of scene where one would develop some kind of love for that. To be frank, more so than traditional historic New Orleans music, the things that influenced me the most were the people I grew up around, the TV I watched, the music that the bus drivers would play on the radio on my way to school. I heard bounce music a lot,I; remember there being a time where Wayne was dropping back to back mixtapes — all of that was part of my early soundscape. I know I was influenced by New Orleans music indirectly in a lot of ways, and as an adult my relationship with it is a bit different now. But I sometimes still feel like an outsider in my own city. People from down here ask me where I’m from all the time because of my accent and my air, and it always makes me super conscious of the things I missed out on as an adolescent — but also, I realize this makes me me.
In middle school, I really only caught music on 106 and Park. That was the 2000s, so I was hip to those artists. But even then my folks didn’t like me listening to rap or R&B (laughs). If only they knew. I remember my friend in middle school making me a mixtape and introducing me to more music from the 2000s era, introducing me to emo music, Lincoln Park, Coldplay, Fall Out Boy, etc. Again, my people did not like me listening to that stuff either.
It wasn’t really until high school where I was able to dive into the stuff I liked hearing because I became a bit more rebellious and just more aware of the shit that spoke to me. I listened to a lot of Jay Z, Lauryn Hill, Wayne, Kanye, Digable Planets, Lupe Fiasco, Blu and Exile, Biggie, Pac, Amy Winehouse, Nina Simone, Nneka, Esperanza Spalding, etc.
What truly got me into making music was my love for poetry and finding out about people like Blu and Exile and being introduced to Digable Planets by my spoken word teacher (rest in peace Ms. Peaches). I just remember hearing those artists and being so in awe of what I was hearing. I felt inspired; I felt like maybe one day my poetry could be presented in this way. So eventually I gravitated towards music because of it.
And again, this is why this tape is so powerful for me, because I linked up with Quest, who used to be a part of this adult slam team called Team SNO, and I remember my first time meeting him was when he visited my school to perform his poetry. Later on, we went on to collaborate on my first project in 2013. This just feels like we paused in 2013 and time traveled to the year 2021, as adults, more grown into our craft. You know so much shit changes in eight years. But so much of our bond remains the same because there’s that foundation.
LUNA: In your music, I hear much about hurting and healing — how does creating music alleviate and elevate your life?
GALEANO: I think music just makes everything better. There’s always a song that we run to when we need to relate, vibe to or even escape. I think when I record heavy songs, that’s me taking time out to release, to reclaim, and to speak healing into myself. You know what they say about words having power? Well, energy does, too. I may be saying something painful, but my energy behind my words has already transformed into something healing you know?
LUNA: What are your sources for creative inspiration? What moves you to create? Do you indulge in other forms of media?
GALEANO: I’m inspired by how much care and attention Tyler the Creator and Frank Ocean put into their music and rollouts. Those were the two people that came to mind. But I don’t think I intentionally make them my sources of inspiration, it’s just something I admire whenever they’re active with releasing music. The rollouts are probably the most exciting part of it for me since I pay attention to stuff like that outside of the actual music. And I think that’s why I go as hard as I do when I make things, because I understand the importance of being able to experience a body of work through visuals and feelings. Like what other ways could I tell you about the album? How can you understand the concept outside of the words?
Another thing that moves me is just being able to make things. I ended up being as creative as I am because I didn’t have the resources to pay someone else for it. Because I come from people who make do with what they have. At some point I stopped looking at it like such a bad thing and just developed the skills. And now, everything that I learn and continue to learn lends itself to each other. Now, people are hiring me to do for them what I couldn’t do for myself at one point. That’s amazing to me. I feel like I’ve proved to myself that I can make it happen. So whenever I want to execute something, fear doesn’t really make its way to my thoughts; I become more excited to learn what I gotta do to make it work, and I think that’s the confidence that taking agency over my art has given me.
Most of what I indulge in is music-making, but since I’m a designer, I have picked up other skills like 3D motion graphics, photography, and filmmaking. I’m interested in learning how to sew, how to make jewelry, and how to actually play instruments. I think once I learn, I’ll be able to explore my ideas even further. But until then, I stay inspired because there’s always something new to make and to learn from.
LUNA: Which one of your tracks from SANTI is your personal favorite?
GALEANO: Off the top, “Not the Same.” I started working on this song right before work, ended up getting fired right after I got there, came home and kept going. Again, using music as a form of healing myself instead of being upset. I got the urge to hit up Quest who I hadn’t seen in years, and I think it’s because I wanted to be around family, music, and someone I could cyph with, talk about next plans with and feel grounded around.
Quest was someone who encouraged me a lot as a teenager; he was the person to record my very first project. He gave me a couch to sleep on when I didn’t have a home. He inspired me to want to learn how to produce. Just an overall solid person. We make this running joke of us being twins and being the female/male versions of each other because it’s true. I think there’s just a special energy with each song on this tape, but this song is the one that kind of inspired everything after. And the drums hittin! I never had a song that I felt I could perform and rock to, but this is the one. My second favorite would be “2 Planets Away” because, again, energy. I ended up crowdsourcing some samples from my IG to insert and experiment with and it just became a really beautiful song. I couldn’t not make that a part of this EP.
LUNA: If you could create your own music festival, who are your top 5 artists?
GALEANO: If I could create a music festival, I would book Celeste, Westside Boogie, Mac Ayres, Blu and Exile, and Greentea Peng.
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